I will not film something because I already knowwhat it is. I will film something because I am interested in it. And while filming I discover all sortsof things to do with this interest. So my scenariosare never really finished. Coincidently What Time is it There? is my first film made with a truly finishedscenario. Because I couldn't find financing to makethis film I had a lot of time to work on the script.

~ Tsai Ming-liang (from interview with Nanouk Leopold, originally published in Skrien, no. 2, March 2002)

Do the Wellspring R1 DVDs of Rebels of the Neon God, The River, The Hole & What Time... represent the correct 24fps length of the films? Or are they (some or all) bad standard conversions which suffer from 4% speed-up despite being NTSC?

Rebels & The River are heavily interlaced. I clock the DVD of Rebels at 101:48, whereas IMDB (and the back of box!) suggest 106 mins. The River clocks in at 1:52:14 on the DVD vs. the not-too-different 115 mins stated at the end of the credits & IMDB. I'm a little confused by this. (The FSF R2 disc of Vive l'amour suffers from 4% speed-up, but it's PAL so that's to be expected.)

I need to get the complete running times right, and don't have notes on a 35mm screening to compare them too unfortunately. Any assitance would be much appreciated!

If it's any help, I've got a reference from a contemporary (pre-DVD) festival screening of Rebels that confirms 106 minutes. The most reliable source is probably Sight & Sound reviews, but I don't have them at my fingertips (MichaelB?), and I'm not sure whether Rebels got a commercial release in the UK. I'm pretty sure The River did, however.

If it's any help, I've got a reference from a contemporary (pre-DVD) festival screening of Rebels that confirms 106 minutes. The most reliable source is probably Sight & Sound reviews, but I don't have them at my fingertips (MichaelB?), and I'm not sure whether Rebels got a commercial release in the UK. I'm pretty sure The River did, however.

Excellent, thanks. The River was indeed theatrically released here (and on VHS by the BFI), but as far as I know the others weren't until the good folks at Axiom picked up The Wayward Cloud. Checking FII, there's a review of The River by Philip Kemp in S&S 8.4 (April 1998). The pages are listed as 34-35 & 51, so presumably it's the feature review. As expected, none of the other films have similar records, unfortunately. Variety lists 115 minutes.

All this stretches my understanding of DVD technology to its limit... How can one tell if interlacing on an NTSC disc is accompanied by speed-up (like the Facets release of Los Muertos, for example)? Is it actually possible to detect without comparing running times from more reliable sources?

Sight and Sound confirms 115 minutes for The River. How this gets translated to 112 is beyond me, unless something's been cut for some reason.

It's possible. I'll have to track down a copy of the BFI VHS and have a look (which the BBFC list as having a running time of 113:12).

Yet more confusion. I've just watched The Hole again, and it clocks in at exactly 89 minutes on the R1 disc. IMDB & other sources list 95 mins as the running time, whereas Film Index International (more reliable, perhaps?) says 93. There is combing and whatnot on the disc, so I assume it's another bad standards conversion - adjusting for 4% speed up would give the 93 mins suggested by FII. No idea where 95 comes from...

Woops, I made a mistake - the time I quoted for The River is actually from the FSF DVD of Vive l'amour. I mixed them up!

The R1 DVD of The River actually clocks in at just over 113 minutes, just like the BFI VHS (a friend confirmed the BBFC time for me). Not that the situation makes any more sense, as correction for 4% speed-up would suggest 118 mins (approx) rather than the 115 stated everywhere else...

I got the Taiwanese Vive L'Amour DVD/BR combo. There are some flubs in the subtitles, but that really doesn't matter much in a Tsai film. The picture quality looked superb to me, crisp and vibrant while maintaining the grain, no flaws that jumped out at me. Certainly a huge step up from the Fox Lorber. Nice interview feature on the DVD.

Heads up: despite all the online information to the contrary, it seems that the French release of 'Visage' does have English subtitles after all. At least, the copy I picked up clearly listed them on the packaging (haven't had a chance to check the disc yet). It's a very nice package as well: two discs with copious extras, in a slipcase with a book of photos.

Heads up: despite all the online information to the contrary, it seems that the French release of 'Visage' does have English subtitles after all. At least, the copy I picked up clearly listed them on the packaging (haven't had a chance to check the disc yet). It's a very nice package as well: two discs with copious extras, in a slipcase with a book of photos.

I was very pleasantly surprised that this was the case and is not a typo on the packaging.

I didn't realize there was any doubt about -- if I'd known there was I could've clarified it long ago. (And Arte's own site has always listed it as an English-subbed release.) Be forewarned that the extras disc is only half-subbed: the video documentary (Fleur dans le miroir, lune dans l'eau) is subbed, the audio documentary (Salomé et le dragon) isn't.

In other news: Tsai's remarkable 25-minute Walker is up on Youku, the site that commissioned it. The other films from this series (Ann Hui's My Way, Gu Changwei's Long Tou, and Kim Tae-yong's You Are More Than Beautiful) can be accessed via the "正片" box at the bottom-right of the video, all with English subs. The videos are most likely blocked for non-Chinese IP addresses, but there's a Chrome plugin that supposedly takes care of that. If it doesn't, well, apologies for getting people's hopes up...

Very belated thanks for that Youku link - just watched the wonderful Walker to alleviate my burning itch to rewatch Stray Dogs, a condition recently further aggravated by Olaf Möller's remarks on the film's visual aspects: nothing else I've ever seen (in cinema) looks quite like it, Tsai is really pushing the envelope of digital filmmaking here in fascinating ways. I hope there will be a Blu-ray, although it'll be difficult to replicate the experience in domestic circumstances.

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned here already, but apparently he's not done yet after all - so looking forward to this. With Denis Lavant!!

It's not exactly an "unretirement," since he's said before that he's only dropping out of "feature" filmmaking (where he had increasing difficulties getting funding). The new film is a medium-length (about one hour) follow-up to Walker shot in Marseille, with Lee reprising the monk figure. He plans to do some more in other cities, including his hometown in Malaysia—actually he may have already made them based on some ambiguous statement in an interview. At the same time he's also said he wouldn't turn it down if someone gave him the chance to make another feature, so I suspect even that semi-retirement will end sooner or later.

BTW, has Tsai mentioned somewhere if there's a set number of the "walker" shorts planned, or if it will just be an ongoing series? To my understanding there are now four (Walker, No Form, Jingang Jing and Meng you), or five with this newly announced one. Hoping these will end up on a video release at some point.